The surgical stapler is a common medical device when performing a surgical procedure on tissues of the digestive tract. During the surgical treatment, the surgical stapler is often use in tissue cutting and stitching. The surgical stapler may perform closing, stapling or cutting operations on the physiological tissue manually or electrically.
The manual operation implements the closing action between the anvil and the cartridge, and the firing action on the tissue to be stapled in a purely mechanical way. The process of the firing needs huge firing force to complete the cutting and closing of the anastomotic stoma, with high requirement for the user. It is easy to cause the mechanical firing to fail once the skills and the strength of force and not mastered properly. The closing effect of the tissue will be affected by inadequate firing force, to cause inadequate cutting and closing, resulting in failure of surgery, and extremely high risk. There is no risk of inadequate firing force for an electric surgical stapler as long as it has adequate power.
A surgeon needs to choose an appropriate tissue squeezing degree (from 1.5 mm to 2.5 mm within a green zone range) according to characteristics of the tissue for different patients at the time of surgery, but closing height shown in the indication window for green zone range of the existing pure mechanical stapler is an approximate display amplified by a mechanical structure. Since the manufacturing error of the mechanical parts, there exists a significant error between the height of the indication window and the actual closing height of the tissue. Therefore, the error caused by only observing the closing height window to determine the squeezing thickness of the tissue may lead to large discreteness of postoperative effects of different patients, which not only affects the efficiency of the surgery, but also causes inconsistent staple formations, two-step staple formation, and other phenomena. In this case, there may appear tissue leakage, tissue necrosis or other postoperative symptoms. For the linear closer and cutter, the general method is to use cartridges of different heights to form staples of different heights in a unified device's closing height. This method costs too many numbers and types of the cartridges, and it does not only affects the efficiency of the surgery, but also may causes the usage of a wrong type of cartridge during an operation under certain circumstance due to the complexity of device management.